ABSTRACT
Titular beast of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” in his Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), the Jabberwock is characterized by its biting jaws, catching claws, and “eyes of flame”; it whiffles and burbles through the “tulgey wood” before being beheaded by the poem’s hero. The initial verse first appeared as “A Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry” in MischMasch, one of Carroll’s private family periodicals, in 1855; while the title invokes
earlier heroic adventures entailing monsters such as Grendel from the Old English heroic poem Beowulf (arguably composed during the first half of the eighth century), the poem was probably inspired by the 1846 translation of German Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué’s poem “The Shepherd of the Green Mountains.” Carroll’s tale includes elements of the quest motif such as the father warning his son to beware the ferocity of the Jabberwock, the Jubjub bird, and the Bandersnatch; and the son using his “vorpal sword” to slay the monster and return with its head. The poem has been translated over 42 times into 16 different languages, with Latin and Greek being perennial favorites. Nevertheless, the Jabberwock, while recognizable, has not entered the English language as a proper noun but instead remains identified with Carroll’s poem. Considered one of the most familiar works of English language nonsense poetry, “Jabberwocky” is an excellent example of the genre, which works with firm logical rules and a high degree of intellectual sophistication. The poem’s imaginative coinage has provided material for considerable linguistic and languagebased research. Its many neologisms include “chortle” and “galumphing,” and the word “jabberwocky” has been extended to mean invented language or nonsensical behavior.
